Isabella [Fenway]

by Aileen Ma

If walking into the dark and chilly entrance had made Isabella indifferent in expectations, walking into the first floor exhibits and seeing the courtyard completely floored her. It left her speechless, yet overflowing with words to describe the utter beauty that lie before her. The perfectly situated square shaped courtyard of raspberry colored flowers and mint green leaves and bushes, along with the gargoyle and saint-like statues within completely transformed her expectations of the four floored museum.

It felt like coming alive for the first time. Like finally knowing that the reason she had been named Isabella was because there was the Isabella Gardener Museum, a place of indescribable beauty and hidden nooks and crannies. Even if that wasn’t why she was named Isabella, it did feel good to know her name granted her free admission to such a wondrous place. She was definitely going to college here just for the museum, if she could help it.

The rest of her time at the museum was dream-like. Like the best of all dreams, the never-ending kind that most definitely were not nightmares.

She by passed the cassette tape commentaries and lost herself in the exhibits. Attempted to decipher medieval handwriting, stand up to catholic statues that had once freaked her out as an even younger girl, and read the facial expressions of men and women in paintings.

She sat in the second floor music room, currently unoccupied but majestic in itself. She sat in one of the seats in the last row and strained to listen to the room as it sang in otherworldly tones. Tried to imagine what the missing paintings would have looked like. Hypothesized that a Rembrandt was really a self portrait. Lost herself in the gaze of a kind face upon a china plate. Took visual pictures, with the aid of her two hands when she walked about the Japanese art room.

And then, she walked up to a painting and almost heard it clear its voice as soon as she locked eyes on it. She shrugged it off, and turned around to see if anyone else had heard it as well, but found no one else in the room, with the exception of the napping museum volunteer in the corner chair. So she shook her head, then smiled a secret smile, and turned to the painting once more…